Biologist Drew Endy debates researcher and historian Jim Thomas on the future of bioengineering. While Endy discusses the potential benefits of being able to "program" DNA, Thomas advocates caution, citing the dangers of untested technology.

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand is co-founder and president of The Long Now Foundation and co-founder of Global Business Network. He created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog (National Book Award), and co-founded the Hackers Conference and The WELL. His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; and The Media Lab. His most recent book, titled Whole Earth Discipline, is published by Viking in the US and Atlantic in the UK.

Drew Endy

Drew Endy helped start the newest engineering major, Bioengineering, at both MIT and Stanford. His research teams pioneered the redesign of genomes and invented the transcriptor, a simple DNA element that allows living cells to implement Boolean logic. He is also a co-founder of Gen9, Inc., a DNA construction company, and the iGEM competition.

Jim Thomas

Jim Thomas is a Research Programme Manager and Writer with ETC group. His background is in communications, writing on emerging technologies and international campaigning.
For the seven years previous to joining ETC Group Thomas was a researcher and campaigner on Genetic Engineering and food issues for Greenpeace International - working in Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand and South East Asia. He has extensive experience on issues around transgenic crops and nanotechnologies has written articles, chapters and technical reports in the media and online.
Trained as a historian to look back at the history of technology, Thomas is now busy communicating the future of technology.

Good evening. IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m Stewart Brand from Long Now Foundation andwelcome to, I guess itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s our third or fourth sort of debate. Most of you are familiarwith the introduction cards so I donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t have to say much about the speakers. On theback is where you write very legible versions of question you might have becauseKevin Kelly will be up here looking at the questions and trying to read them in thedark. HeÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll pass the good ones up to me and IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll hit these guys with some of the best.I was at Stanford fifty years ago and the Biology Department, we did not have aDepartment of Bioengineering and it would have been unimaginable even thoughmolecular biology was just getting cranked up at that point.This is a technology thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s growing about as fast as microbes do. That is with greaterexponential speed than information technology has. WeÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re now at the point similar towhen microcomputers began to replace the mainframes and the minicomputers; andthe making of the technology left the universities and the government labs, and wentinto garages. So, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re now getting garage biotechnology. And one assumes, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œWell,what does that mean?ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ There must be some good news and some bad news and then,how do we tell the difference?Tonight, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll use our debate format which doesnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t have winners and losers; it hasprobers in both directions. Previously, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve asked the audience to suggest who goesfirst but tonight, we really need a grounding of what synthetic biology is. So, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢regoing to ask Drew Endy to go first. And the format is he speaks and shows slides forfifteen minutes, then the three of us sit down up here and Jim Thomas interviewsDrew to draw out more background, field data, all the stuff a good interviewer does.And to show that heÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s paying attention, when he finishes that ten-minute interview, hehas to summarize DrewÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s argument to DrewÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s satisfaction or Drew says, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s it.You got it!ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ Then they reverse roles. And Jim Thomas from the ETC group comesup and does his fifteen minutes and then sits down in is probed for ten minutes byDrew, and then Drew has to give his position up to the point that Jim agrees, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢sright. You got it!ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ And then, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re into more free form interaction, your questions,and so on. LetÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s start with Drew Endy.So, my remarks will start with what I want to do; second, why I want todo it; third, whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s happening with respect to the wet technology, some of the issuesthat come up, a proposal, and thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll be it.What I want to do? IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d like to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer. Bybiology, I mean the stuff of life, so a little bacteria that swim around, make chemicals,perhaps someday go into your body and fix stuff up. I also mean the stuff of life likethis; larger objects, mammals, what have you, bring them back, change them. Andthen once we get all that working, maybe other things too although that might be morethan ten or twenty years from now; so, spaceships that self-assemble, ecosystems, orTrey ParkerÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s polygluteal monkeys.In other words, how do we take this material, the one part of nature for whichengineering as Stewart mentioned has not really yet been well developed and turn itinto an engineerable substrate such that were it ever possible to make giganticprogrammable gourds that differentiate into four bedroom, two bath houses; we coulddo that. These are ideas obviously, and itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s not clear that the substrate of biology is aphysical material, chemical material to support all of these but one can imagine.What do I want to do? Part 2; tools that enable humanity. It seems to be irresponsibleto set out to rebuild the living world if it were without also understanding who we areand what we intend to do with that capability. So, for example tools that supportconversation. This is a slide of a website from Paul Rabinow's group at Berkeleytrying to bring people together to talk about some of the issues of making biologyeasier to engineer. Tools that enable the sharing of wisdom, so if we have tens ofthousands of years with biology as a tool for us as a source of food, how do we takeadvantage of that or at least continue to recognize and celebrate that. Tools forbuilding a community, so if this is a photograph of students from Lincoln HighSchool here in San Francisco working at UCSF, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œI was a teenage genetic engineer lastsummer,ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ they say. Is that good or bad? And how do we give these students a futurethat they can build for themselves where they can take responsibility for the directmanipulation of genetic material? Tools for safety; if this is The Subway Newspaperfrom thirty years ago in Boston where they were publishing recipes for how to clone atoxin in your kitchen, is that a good or bad thing to do? How come people didnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢tcome forward doing this or did they kill themselves trying so we didnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t hear aboutthem? Tools for security; if this is a publicly accessible sequence for a genome thathappens to encode a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola and you can each download it fromthe internet and purchase the DNA encoding it for $20,000; do we secure a worldbased on biology on which thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s possible or not? Tools that enable beauty; beautyboth human constructed and inspired by what we see in nature.So, those are the two things that IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m arguing for. Tools that make biology easier toengineer and tools that enable humanity. Why do I want to do this? One, tounderstand. You can take apart a car in order to understand a car and that gives yousome sort of understanding. But then if you take the pieces as theyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re scattered aboutyour driveway and attempt to put them back together, you might have a couple piecesleft over, youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll have an ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œA-ha!ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ moment when you turn the key. It might work or itmight not. Basically in biology, in its modern era over the last seventy years, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢veinherited a reductionist approach driven by a physicist starting around 1930 and thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢sbecame molecular biology and genetics. WeÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve gotten really, really good at takingnatural biological systems, pulling them apart, studying their individual components,reading out their DNA. But we donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t actually understand how all those componentsyet go back together. So, one of the real reasons IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d like to do this is to understand,learning by building. And just as an example of how bad we are in terms ofunderstanding natural biological systems, IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll show you this little movie thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s aresearch project thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll published from my lab. This is a movie of bacteria E-coligrowing and dividing and all the cells have been infectedÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚Â¦excuse me, two of thecells have been infected with the virus and theyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll turn green, the two infected cells.And youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll see one of the cells popped, the virus is so tiny you canÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t see it but you cansee it as it destroys the cell. And the other cell just keeps growing and dividing. Thisis for a virus that was first isolated from nature around the 1950s. Its genome wasread out 48,502 base pairs in the 1980s. So, if youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve heard of the company 23andMefor studying human DNA, you could head a company for this virus back in theReagan years. We have no idea why one cell will pop and the other cell will continueto survive. We have some stories but no biophysical models.So, by learning how to put these things back together, by taking the pieces as thebiologists have described them as these little entities and trying to reassemble them,we might learn that our models of how these things are actually parts, still theyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re notquite parts like we think they are.Another reason IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m excited and IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m arguing for getting better at engineering biology,developing tools and support that, and tools that support humanity is to enable whatIÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll call sustainable agility as well as artistry and that might not be the right word. Imight mean just simply beauty.In terms of sustainable agility, you folks might have seen this before; this is acomparison of before and after corn or maize. On the left, you see corn prior todomestication. And then on the right, something thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s more familiar. If you look atthe foods that we eat, we eat very few of the things that are edible as far as plants areconcerned. So, one thing I might hope for the future is agility with respect todomesticating or whatever the equivalent is to different crops, both as theenvironment exists today and perhaps in a changing environment.Tool kit, so what are some of the technologies that exist today? Well, to put this incontext, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve lived in a world where for the last human generation, the last thirty-five years, thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s been since the invention of recombinant DNA, the birth of themodern biotechnology industry, companies like Genentech here in the San Franciscoarea. And these are the tools, if you will, of genetic engineering, some of the mostbasic tools; recombinant DNA, lets you take two existing pieces of DNA and cut andpaste them making a new molecule that might do something useful such as produceinsulin in bacteria so you get that drug more reliably and serve as for treating diabetes.Polymerase chain reaction, the second old tool that you take a single molecule ofDNA and make many, many copies of it so itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s more easy to do stuff. And thensequencing of DNA lets you take a molecule and then read it out, getting access to theinformation.These are not the only tools that can power the engineering of biology and much ofwhat I view synthetic biology to be about is the invention and implementation of newtools. So, for example construction of DNA. Rather than manually manipulatingDNA with enzymes, let me just have it constructed to order. Biology is often timesvery complex, maybe I can abstract it and simplify it.IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll give you examples of four and five. And then, this turns out to be a very radicalidea, maybe we could standardize biology so that the component tree can be reusedmore easily. Here are some specific examples. So, DNA construction. It turns outthat back in 1982, a chemist working in Colorado more or less perfected at that time achemistry called phosphoramidite chemistry and what this means is you can buy injars chemicals today which are derived from sugar cane, and these chemicals end upbeing the four basis of DNA or phosphoramidites in form that can be readilyassembled. So, four of these bottles up on the top here, one will be a bottle of A, T,C, and G and so one. And you hook these bottles up to a machine. Into the machinecomes information from a computer, a sequence of DNA, T-A-A-T-A whatever youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢dlike to build, and that machine will stitch the genetic material together from scratch.So, if youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve ever seen Star Trek where they have the food replicating system and youknow, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œIÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d like a pumpkin-spiced mocha or latte or somethingÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚Â¦ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ you can compilethat from warp energy drive, I donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t know exactly how it works. DNA synthesis isthe equivalent technology. You take information and material, and you compile. Youtake information and the raw chemicals, you compile genetic material. ItÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s practicallyspeaking, the coolest, most impressive/scary technology IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve encountered.DNA is complicated. So, if we were to do all our genetic engineering at this level ofresolution, T-A-A-T-A-C-G-A-C-T-C-A-C-T-A-T-A-G-G-A-G-A, it would becometedious, if not unreliable, it would be akin perhaps. The analogy is not perfect,perhaps like programming a computer in machine language. At some point, it mightbe good to know how to do that but often times, people would like to program at ahigher level. And so, some of these ideas like obstruction of genetic componentryinvolves the idea of taking these different layers or function, the DNA layer andputting on top of that a parts layer, we could call genetic objects that just dosomething and you donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t have to know all of the sequence information, and then wemight be able to build still higher level functional objects like a device that couldreceive or send information or smell like bananas or make a balloon, and then maybewe could have a system; makes a drug, swims around, finds a tumor, and attacks it,who knows?If we could pull this off, what weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d end up with is a future in which some peoplecould become expert systems engineers in biology that could start to design and buildorganisms. And they wouldnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t actually need to know down at the bottom that DNAwas made up of four bases. Let alone anything about phosphoramidite chemistry.They would compile down via tools to the sequence level, ship that information over,somebody would print the DNA to get their DNA program back, and then run it.It turns out weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re working on this. ThereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a registry of standard biological parts atthis website. Today, you can get thirty-five hundred BioBrick DNA parts. TheyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢refreely available if you work in a research university, and simply because the legalsystem requires we distribute these parts under whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s known as the researchexemption. This collection of parts is growing geometrically. So, two months ago, itwas 2,000 parts. We just had students come in with 1,500 more. Students do thingslike these; showing up in the lab dissatisfied with the bouquet of E-coli, how it smells;they decide to reprogram its stench. If the cell is growing, it smells like winter green;otherwise, print banana smell. You could find the part that they made J45-200,thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a DNA sequence. When you put that sequence of DNA into the bacteria, itsmells like bananas. They were sufficiently accomplished as teenagers, first andsecond year undergraduates but they went live after a couple months with a smell-testdemo.Now, along with these set of tools like parts and standardization, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re seeing if Icome back to the construction business of DNA also a geometric increase in the paceor capability of DNA synthesis, says the paper published within the last year wherefolks are building from these raw chemicals, from scratch a piece of DNA almost600,000 base pairs long; the length of a small bacterial genome. In fact, the biggestprojects IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve seen today have assembled pieces of DNA that are almost ten millionbase pairs long, almost the size of the genome of bakerÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s yeast.Limits; thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to be some interesting limits. One, to look ahead to SaulGriffithÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s talk from January, probably comes from energy. Saul, here is veryconcerned about human civilization and where we produce our energy, and whetheror not weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll be able to transition to something thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s sustainable and renewable. Itturns out that biology has a thing on our planet. It doesnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t have access to that muchenergy. He estimates it might be half a terawatt out of a civilization, our civilizationthatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s running on 15 or 18 terawatts. Maybe heÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s wrong by a factor of ten, andbiology really can get access to five terawatts. ItÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s still not going to be an excess ofenergy via biology. So, if you hear about bio-fuels right now, bio-fuels wonÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t solveour entire energy problem. And because thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a limitation there, itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to puttremendous pressure as I hope we hear about on our land use and so on.Security as I alluded to via the Ebola sequence on the screen is a huge issue. Andsince the anthrax attacks on our country back in 2001, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve spent over $60 billion inthe name of biosecurity. This has largely resulted in a reestablishment of classifiedbiosafety level 4 facilities. BL4 facilities are facilities working on the most dangerouspathogens. Ironically, the FBI claimed to have traced the anthrax attacks back to thevery facility as shown here.Then, we again come back to the issues of communities and can our generation goingforward and beyond bring together what might seem like polar opposites? On the left,you see the IGEM community. This is the Genetic Engineering Olympic studentsdoubling in number practically every year. On the right, are people who aredissatisfied or actively against the deployment of genetic engineering. I have someproposals to consider and IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll quickly show them here. Should teenagers practicegenetic engineering? Yes. Should military force include biotech? No. Willbiohackers be good or bad? TheyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll be good if we encourage them and celebratethem. Should the parts be patented or shared? They should be free but maybe wehave some interesting terms and conditions to discuss. And should genetic engineersign their work? Yes.Last slide, IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m arguing for the development of tools that make biology easy toengineer. In parallel, IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m arguing that we also develop tools that enable ourhumanity as we take biotechnology forward. Thanks very much!Outstanding! Alright, so everybodyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s lightÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s working?Thank you very much, Drew. Thank you everyone for coming out on aMonday evening. We really appreciate it. And as always itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s great to hear a veryreflective technologist and may there many more like him.You began your list of questions at the end there and IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll start by saying, shouldteenagers practice genetic engineering? You think they should. Who should andshouldnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t. Who else? If there was a limit, who should use these tools? What wouldthat be?I think so long as somebody is disposed to be constructive, right, and I mighteven go further than that and say, so long as somebody is not disposed to bedestructive, that would be the initial set. Then, IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d open that up for wiserconsideration but I donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t know that I would want to preclude access to thesetechnologies. It seems my gut tells me that many of the technologies around biologyhave been not officially locked up but hard to get access to, and I think itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s ironic thatsome of the difficulty in getting access to the technology comes out of theconversations of three decades ago where issues of safety drove a very, very stronginstitutional oversight framework to come into existence. Many of those safetyconcerns were well founded. But as the cost associated with that, we now live in aworld where most people donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t feel comfortable talking about DNA or geneticengineering. Most people presume that all of the work is dangerous and thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s whatwe inherit. If I look forward, there are much more serious dangers IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d get freaked outabout with respect to a future where a small number of people have access to mattercompilers for genetic material. Imagine if only one or two organizations in the worldhave access to that technology. ItÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s much more exciting for me to imagine a worldwhere anybody who might usefully deploy biotechnology for a local situation hasaccess to the tools, has access to the know-how, and can do it. Now, that might be afantasy for many numbers of perspectives but thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s my starting response.And specifically then, you go on to say that your concern, if I got this right, thatthe military has access to this technology, and what would you do about that?Matt Meselson from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a generation before was partof a group who argued successfully that the military, the US government should standdown its offensive biological weapons program. As I understand it, having inheritedliterally, not being alive at the time that world. And so, the arguments as I rememberhaving learned them that they made were, geez, we already have weapons; two, wecanÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t really control biological weapons; and three, other people can develop them andthereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s not limited access to say, nuclear material with biology. Biology iseverywhere, so we canÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t sort of lock up the raw materials. So, they have no strategicvalue for us. And those rational, reasoned arguments carry the day during the Nixonadministration. I wonder to what extent weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re seeing today perhaps are relaxing onsome of those reasons, maybe weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re getting better at controlling biology. And so,weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d want to be vigilant if you will, to pay attention to the debasement of any of thosereasons.But another thing, at least in the United States, thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s been a very, very strongimmune response around biosecurity from the anthrax attacks in the fall of ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢01. So,IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d like to just at least hold the line around some of MeselsonÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s arguments. Go backand read Scientific American from that point in time, youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll see, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œHey, we should nothave classified biosafety level 4 facilities. LetÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s do this in the open if weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re going todo anything.ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬So, a lot of the argumentation for developing, for example the 1918 flu viruswas synthesized a few years ago using synthetic biology. ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a virus that called 50million people in the last century.Yeah.And the argumentation was that it was in order to defend against pandemics, theflu that is still to come. Do you accept that? If thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s non-military or would youconsider that military?That work was done at the CDC. It was done in public. There was debatewithin the research community as to whether or not the sequence information for that1918 flu should be made public. Not all the researchers agreed. It was made public.It was reviewed by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity before it waspublished. The scientific community rallied behind that. The arguments basicallybeing made were of the form no disease has been cured in secret, and we have to keepthis stuff in the open. Others, notable around this part of the world, Bill Joy and RayKurzweil had a nice editorial in The New York Times saying this is the mostirresponsible thing theyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve encountered. I think the scientific community would pointto the subsequent work and say, it was good to have that information out there, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢veunderstood a little bit more about the evolution of the flu, and itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s not something thatshould be done without concern for safety issues but it was the right thing to do.You talked about agility, you talked about understanding nature. I mean,another reason that you appear to be involved with synthetic biology is that youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢reactually a founder on the board of commercial company using synthetic biology.WhatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s the role of commerce in understanding nature and building agility?ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a great question. I was attracted to being involved with the companybecause one of the core technologies of synthetic biology, DNA synthesis has little orno public support. And so, if you wanted to get better at that technology, when thecommercial sector, the investment sources came up and said, ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œWeÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re willing to helpwith this,ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ that was an eye-opener for me. IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ve seen the strengths and weaknesses ofwhat you can do in a commercial sector. ItÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s surprising to me that there is not publicrecognition of the importance of DNA synthesis technology and how the publicprobably wants to consider having an active voice and seeing this technology develop,to have a say, and how itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s deployed.And I was really taken by one of your last slides later on when you're talkingabout agility and creating agility. What you showed was teosinte, the originalancestor of maize and then you show us the maize plant. We'll, there's a plant thatwas developed through our consoles means without genetic engineering, and so thatseems to be an argument for agility without biotech, isnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t it?Well, I'd argue that maze is a biotechnology. It's a biotechnology developedby particular methods over a particular period of time. By agility I mean, to the extentthat is possible, and I'm perfectly happy to recognize whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s research and whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢sready to be commercialized to the extent that is possible if we needed that to do thatfaster not waiting for many, many, many generations. I'd like to have that capability.You're very closely identified with open-source biotechnology trying to makesure that as this move ahead, it shed. But there have been people on this stage I thinkwho are pushing for patents in this area, how do you defend against that?How do you defend against patents? I'd rather avoid that question and answera related question just to be honest which is how do you develop an open technologyplatform. And you develop an open technology platform, so far as I can figure it, bydoing two things. One, you build a community; and two, you protect againstencumbrance of reuse and combination meaning; when you take any two things andgive them away, somebody else could take these two things, put them together andsay, oh this is mine. So how do you do those two things? In biotechnology, patentsare the dominant form of protecting against encumbrance of reusing combination.We can't afford it with another fifteen hundred parts coming in to the collection thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s$30 million in patent fees; and if you were to give thirty million bucks, I'd go makemore parts. And practically then, what that means is, we have to build a communitythat grows faster and can now innovate (indiscernible) who inevitably come aroundthe periphery. There are some other things we can do. We can talk about that more indetail. So, I'm not for or against patents, but I think patents per se have a costassociated them and they have a time constant associated with them. They have a lag,and that makes them exclusive. And so, I think a lot of the innovation and pacing ofinnovation in biotech and the good that can come from it would be better realized byhaving complimentary frameworks that might operate on shorter time scales or havelower transaction cost.So patents have a cost, but those have a very clear opportunity which is whypeople take them out. A number of the parts in the BioBricks are actually patented.So, this situation, this is just going to get subversive.Most pieces of DNA on the planet have not been patented. The uses offragments of DNA, there a great number of patents in United States and in Japan andfewer elsewhere, so with respect to the BioBricks collection; our challenge right nowis to take something which is openly distributed within a research community. So,researchers at universities can use stuff under whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s called the research exemption.How do we make that accessible to people within the commercial space or outside theresearch community. So we're doing okay now, but we need to basically extend ourcommunity and figure out how to do that. So, we're working on an agreement withlawyers and hope to have that ready for public comment. But it is a tricky problemfor us.Great. Time up ahead.So, what I heard very clearly, you said a number of times were, you're interestedin making biology easier to engineer. And it sounds like you donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t really want to putany limits on who uses it, who can engineer it. You want them to be a generallyavailable platform, and you want to supplement that with tools that would allowhumanity to behave more wisely or something like that; tools for humanity I think itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢show you put it. And your reasons for this, is by rebuilding nature from thisfundamental place that you want to understand how nature works better, it's buildingby understanding. And you have an argument around where you called agility, thathaving more technological tools in our toolbox means that we can deal with some ofthe pressures that are coming down the pike whether thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s climate change or hungerin the case of food. And then, you talked about some of the limits that you do see onthis field and some of the challenges. And those challenges included that we havelimits on energy use. But neither of this is probably isnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t the appropriate way to goabout in answering energy concerns with biofuels. But your concern is certainlyabout the military use of this technology, and you had other questions about shouldteenagers use this and equally shared in. And you had some concerns about theintellectual property framework, and you feel it should be as free and open aspossible. Is that kind of everything?What did he leave out?ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s 93% correct! ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s terrific, actually. I would not like to enable peoplewho actively seek to cause harm with the technology. So whether itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a nation, call upthe military of the nation; whether it's an organization; or an individual criminal, not ahacker but a criminal. I guess, I would emphasize just complimenting what you saidthat it's very hard to look ahead on some of this technology given the geometricincrease in some of the capabilities. So sequencing and synthesis both, but synthesisin particular has a technology. It's getting better year after year after year, much likecomputers are if you're familiar with Moore's Law. And so, little bits of uncertaintyprojecting along those exponentials lead to interesting futures. But I think no matterwhat, things are likely to happen pretty quickly, so maybe just to compliment whatyou said at theÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚Â¦About the speed.Yeah.Great.Thank you.Jim, you're on. Great! Thank you!Thanks, Jim.Thank you, Drew and to Stewart. My colleague, Pat Mooney, whoÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s lived amuch longer now than I have, reckons that it takes roughly a human generation tounderstand the impacts of our technology, and I think heÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s probably being a bit shorton that. I think it's something more like a human lifetime. So, I'm not reallyexpecting to get a very clear reading on synthetic biology tonight or anytime soon.But IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m going to argue that that lag between deploying our technologies andunderstanding our technologies is a good reason why we should be supplementing theart of the long view with that policy of the long path by which I mean the deliberatecareful part of precaution.And I know I made that I've been build as an historian tonight, and thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a big shoesto fill in especially if I bumped off my history degree doing direct action. But I'mgoing to try and not disappoint to bring at least a few lessons from history, andparticularly lessons from the closest parallel that I can find which is the syntheticchemical industry.And apart from the name and the fact that DNA synthesis is a chemistry technique,what this two fields share is that both of our building synthesizing nature fromstandard molecular parts. And indeed the early chemists believed that they couldunderstand nature better by building it just as Drew does. But I think the parallel thatwe're looking at right now with Synthetic Biology is the mid-19th century when thesynthetic chemists begun to commercialize that field. I just want to quickly show youhow parallel these two moments are.So if you got it 1856, this was the time when a teenager in East London calledWilliam Henry Perkin, who was supposed to be synthesizing an antimalarial drugquinine, ended up synthesizing a synthetic dye mauveine. And realizing this was ared-hot commercial prospect, he commercialized it. And a bunch of French, Germanand Swiss entrepreneurs, in sort of mid-19th century equivalent of Craig Venter orVinod Khosla copied his business model, and they also started producing syntheticdyes. And on the back of the synthetic dye industry, the modern chemical industrywas born.When you zip forward a hundred and fifty years and just across the bay, Jay Keaslingis also trying to synthesize an antimalarial compound this time Artemisinin usingbiology. And he finds out that he can synthesize gasoline, he sets up a biofuelsbusiness and people like Vinod Khosla and Craig Venter copied the idea; and beforeyou know it, you have a booming synthetic life industry. And whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s interesting isthat this new synthetic life industry is following some of the same questions that thesynthetic chemists faced a hundred and fifty years ago. So Drew dealing withquestions about monopoly, and I hope you donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t mind, but I think they're very 19thcentury view of monopoly that you have.In the middle of the 19th century, you had a booming open-source movement and arolled back of the patent movement of the patent laws. But they're really allowed theindustry to take off. Within a very short time however, that itself have been rolledback.In the mid-1970s, a bunch of German companies lobbied for a strong patent law.They used that to build a very strong monopoly which by 1925 was I.G. Farben, thefourth largest monopoly in the world. And since that time, the chemical industry hasbeen a highly-concentrated and highly-powerful industry right through to now. Andif you look at BASF, which is one of those original companies, it's now the largestchemical company. It's also got a one-half billion dollar agreement with Monsanto inGMO seeds; position itself with the head of the pact on nanotechnologies. We'removed in that case, from monopoly to oligopoly.And I think we're going to see this, exactly this was synthetic biology. And whilethere's an attempt to build the commons we're already seeing patents being placed,being written by people like Craig Venter and DuPont which are being set to crowdout the commons and established a monopoly position. There is going to be Microsoftfor synthetic biology. I salute the attempts to kick against that, but I think history ison the side of Craig Venter on this one.And Drew is concerned about militarization and rightly so. And you go back to thehistory of synthetic chemistry back in the 1850s. You have people like Lyon Playfair,a British chemist, saying that you could use chemistry in the Crimean warfare forchemical weapons. This caused a real stir, if we had at least two treaties trying to banchemical weapons. But by the time the First World War came around, both the Alliesand the Germans are really seeing synthetic chlorine into the wind to try and gas theiropponents.Two decades later, I.G. Farben, BASF again, was supplying Zyklon B into the gaschambers at Auschwitz. It is said to the founders of BASF in the 1860s, that theirfacilities would be used to carry out mass murder by their own government; theywould have said that was an extreme and improbable thing. But the balance ofprobability changed very quickly across one human lifetime.And I really do think that it's a mistake to think that with synthetic biology where wealready have had agents built that can kill 50 million people as it did last century inthe case of 1918 flu virus that you can, on the one hand, restrain the hostile uses ofthis technology; and on the other hand have a booming industry. And that really is afairytale that the high-tech companies and high-tech industries tell their population totry and make them sleep better at night. I think if Drew is serious about disarming thefuture, he has to realize that the existence of an industry, an industrial capacity meansthat that they will be commandeered in wartime by states. Even states that you thinkyou trust. And the way to disarm the future is to disarm the large-scale commercialproduction of anything using synthetic biology.And I think thirdly, looking back to the chemical industry, there's a clear lesson oneconomic destruction. It didnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t have to wait for soldiers to be killed on the battlefieldbefore they're already economic deaths on the agricultural fields of Turkey, ofMexico, and of India. But in fact, those who grew the natural dyes, the dyestuffsindustry, saw the emergence of the synthetic dyestuffs industry back in the 1860s asan attack on first their livelihoods and later their lives.So 1897, BASF and Bayer had a synthetic indigo dye, blue, which led to the collapseof indigo growing in Bengal. Seventy-five percent of the area planted to indigocollapsed within a decade, and then when famine came along, millions of unemployedgrowers ended up dead.And those are just sort of first canaries in the coal mine we've seen wave after wave ofsynthetic products made by chemistry putting out of work rubber tappers and cottonproducers and so forth. But I think synthetic biology is probably going to outdo all ofthat.I mentioned already Jay Keasling, which is one of DrewÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s colleagues. He has aproject to working with some of the Sanofi-Aventis to replace Artemisia which isusually grown by thousands of small farmers in East Africa and Southeast Asia. Andbasically, to under cut them and put them out of business. But it gets further; when Ispoke with Jay Keasling recently, he told me that as far as he was concerned,Synthetic Biology meant that ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‹Å“anything that can be made from a plant can now bemade by a microbe in a vat.ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ Think about that. ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œAnything that can be made from aplant can now be made by a microbe in a vat,ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ a statement like that if it's true, is thedeath knell for economies that depend on plant-derived commodities; whether thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢stropical oils or fibers or rubber or plant extracts to pharmaceuticals and flavorings andso forth. What Jay KeaslingÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s statement means is that, for the customers of thosecommodity-dependent countries which is usually the poorest countries in the world,they can now dangle the carrots on their concern of synthetic biology and thenrenegotiate costs. They can renegotiate trade deals. They can switch to microbialsynthesis and leave whole nations up in the air, essentially to let them spiral intohunger, violence, and unrest.So, monopoly, militarization, massive economic destruction; three things that we canalready see from the beginning of this in the last synthetic industry, but the real doozywith synthetic chemistry, came a full century later. And thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s in 1962 when RachelCarson published ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œSilent SpringÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ and drew back the curtain on a host of unexpectedtoxicities of what was thought to be the good side of synthetic chemistry. Thepesticides, the paints, the fertilizers, the refrigerants, and so forth; the whole betterliving through chemistry package. And for showing that tremendous cost that thosebenefits were paid for, she was called emotional, unscientific, she was called a fearmonger, all sort of labels that today get put on people who are critical ofbiotechnology. But she really didnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t even have a part of it.Some years after Rachel CarsonÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s death, Drew and I are now part of a generation withthe lowest sperm counts in history, under a depleted ozone layer, and every night mywife feeds my child breast milk with persistent organic pollutants in it. And we arethe privileged ones.For communities of color and poor communities in the shadow of chemical facilities,the attack for the synthetic chemical industry on their lives and their health issomething more like a slow genocide, which is not to say synthetic biology is going tobe toxic, but it is to say we need to properly weigh that which we do not know. Andwe need to take it extremely serious. ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s being discussed on this stage before; it'sthe Black Swan that Nassim Taleb talks about or Paul Saffo's cone of uncertainty.In the case of Synthetic Biology, we already have significant questions over some ofthe assumptions underlying the notion that DNA is a code that can be programmedand is heritable and so forth. But if you have those questions we shouldnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t be movinginto commercial use. And thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s why civil society generally calls for a very strong useof the precautionary principles in this and maybe we can discuss that more.I want to end with three mistakes that I see looming in the longer term for syntheticbiology to open up questions. First, the discussion so far is just about microbes andweÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re soon going to see synthesis of plants, of animals, and certainly of human beingsand we should think what that means.Secondly, we absolutely mustnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t try and treat synthetic biology with the same set ofregulatory and governance tools that we use for genetically modified organism. Theyare different quantitatively and qualitatively. Qualitatively, youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re not talking about asmall piece of DNA taken from somewhere in nature and then put in to a genome thatmostly already had existed in nature. To try to understand the bio safety of that,countries use something called substantial equivalence that is kind of pseudoscientificbiosafety tool. It doesnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t work with genome, absolutely wonÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t work with syntheticbiology where youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re going to be designing entirely novel sequence of DNA andincreasingly putting it into a entirely novel genome so we donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t yet have any models,predictive models, for working out the bio safety of these synthetic organisms. And Ithink thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to be a black hole into which this, the whole field is going toget sucked. Quantitatively, itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s different too. If Drew is successful in making biologyeasier to engineer such as anybody, teenagers or whatever can do this, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re going tosee a massive increase in the number of engineered organisms entering the biosphere.I discovered that thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s an amazing job that somebody has here in the Bay Areawhich is from NASA and thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s the Planetary Protection Officer. It's got to be thecoolest job there is and apparently her job is to make sure that no alien life forms getinto the biosphere but I think she is looking at the wrong place. I think she should bechecking out the synthetic biology labs and particularly the synthetic labs of J. CraigVenter who claims in his patents and his public pronouncement that he has a methodof making millions of new species everyday. Think that up, millions of new specieseveryday. I mean, what does that mean? It means probably that Kevin KellyÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s allspecies directory is going to go find a whole lot of storage and it means that thetaxonomists arenÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t going to sleep for the next hundred years but what does that meanfor the biosphere which is already under stress from climate change and chemicalsand so forth. We know the alien species introduce to the biosphere or in to differentparts of the biosphere are the second worst cause of species extinction.Which finally brings me to the third and I think the biggest mistake that this field iscommitting and that is that itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s adapting an extremely destructive business plan.Actually, Drew has touched on this. So far, as far as I can see, the synthetic biologybusiness plan is making microbe to turn sugar in to something, usually biofuels ormaybe chemicals. And this is often expressed as the so called the bioeconomy whichis going to replace petroleum with sugar. Whether it is food sugars such as corn orcane but we know thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a bad idea from ethanol. That if you use food sugars, youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢regoing to be displacing food and that pushes up prices and pushes people into hungeror more if the suggestion is long term, itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to be cellulose. ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s to say thewoody part of our plants and I think accessing that woody part of our plants is avery dangerous move. WeÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re going to see a massive corporate grab on plant biomassin the coming years facilitated by synthetic biology and Drew has told you howsignificant that is.So hereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s the difference between Drew and I, we actually share a lot of values and wedo talk from time to time but Drew basically advocates for the fastest possiblediffusion of the synthetic biology tools and I basically favor of a deliberatecontainment policy. To offer a basket of mix metaphors, I think we should beslamming on the breaks, certainly on commercialization, that we should be lockingthis up in the lab until we really understand it; that we should be divorcing the sciencefrom the commercial world, thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a disaster; and that we should be very carefullylooking before we leap. I mean, if we are doing all of these things right now becauseof the very powerful, commercial synthetic life industry is coming into being rightnow and that window for polite debates like this is rapidly closing. Thank you.Great.Thank you. Well, thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s terrific. Many questions, to start, IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m not sure if thisis the right question so it's, as a preface, the first one, is there some way you thinkpractically to protect nature? So you talk about the use of these tools by commercialagents to get access to the remaining three quarters of the biomass that is not acommodity if you will. Is there some practical way from your perspective to protectwhatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s still not a commodity and is it only linked to decoupling the technologydevelopment from the industry and commercialization?Well, thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s part of it. I mean I think it is as you say 24% of plant biomass iscurrently used by civilization that leaves about 76% or so ready to be commercializedonce we have a way of commercializing it and commodifying it. And so a verystraightforward way is just not to develop those tools, not develop the tools that turncellulose into usable sugar to make plastics and biofuels, that stays withthe technologists, for the world governments to enact very strong treaties. We have theConvention on Biological Diversity which exists for the sustainable use andconservation of biodiversity. ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s the place that should be making a very clearstatement. I think the key point here is that those synthetic biologist and others whosay that we have this available cellulose whether it is a leftover corn stalks or itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢swood in forests gives a sense, and itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a lie, that this is somehow available. The cornstalks that are left behind the field are exactly what you need to build the soil so thatyou can grow the food for the next generation. ThatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s not available at all. ItÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s notavailable and it shouldnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t be made available. And to steal it is to destroy the soil andif we destroy the soil as Franklin Roosevelt says ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã…â€œThe nation that destroys the soildestroy itself.ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬ HeÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s absolutely right. In the forest, the idea here is that forests aresomehow storehouses of carbon and sugar that we can just access when we want. It'snot true their vast, vast ecosystem that clean our water and clean our air, and we needto absolutely protect and defend those.And the means for doing that are at the level of the tools development andtheir commercialization?If you want to create social change, there are two things. One is that you have tohave social organizing and thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s legal and political organizing and social organizing.The other is you need to prevent encroaching threats and what I see is developingsynthetic biology are encroaching threats, threats to the cellulose locked up in all thoseforest and I want to disable those threats.You mentioned that Jay KeaslingÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s project on the East Bay involved taking amicrobe in a vat and making Artemisinin for treating malaria. Is it ever okay to makesomething in a vat filled with microbes and how would you decided if itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s okay?Yeah. Beer is a great thing to make in a vat and if that I believe Amyris startedby making beer and I think should have stopped at that point, with that recent plantover Emeryville. I think the question here is and itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a general question fortechnology, if youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re going to develop a technology that impacts people on the otherside of the world, they have to have a say in the development of that technology.What this means is we need to have much more reflective and participative method ofassessing our technologies very, very early on so we can identify whoÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to beimpacted and we can bring them into the discussion. The problem is the justiceproblem that Amyris Biotechnology and whoever invested in them is about to make akilling, maybe literally, offer something thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to undercut the livelihood ofthousands of people in East Africa and we need a process. And this is a biggertechnology question. We need a process by which that can be flagged up and therecan be some sort of intervention.Given that work that was sponsored by the Gates Foundation, do you find thatsurprising or ironic?Yeah. ItÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s not entirely surprising but the large monopoly that tries to move in tothe area of development also ends up replicating its problems in the area ofdevelopment but I think itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s definitely worrying. My understanding from talking withJay was that they were actually told that they should move on to make anotherbusiness and so thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s what made them to move in to biofuels which is the secondproblem. We have lack of governance over large and powerful foundations as well.And we need to control that.Some of the modern computers where first built by von Neumann and histeam in the 1950s. Those were commissioned to design hydrogen bombs and so on.And today, we live in a world where going through transition about a generation ago.People got basically fed up with limited access to computers and started making theirown. Do you see any possible path around a biotechnology that might not be in tomilitarization even if nation states go bad or rogue or what have you?Yeah.Or is that really inevitable?I think itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a technology which a state can use for its own interest or a powerfulentity whether itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a corporation or whatever can use. ThereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a pretty good chancethat itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to get use so IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m reasonable pessimistic I think. If this technology isgoing to be developed in a way that is very deliberate then that deliberateness has totry and reduce the ability for it to get into the hands of overly powerful players. Welive in an unjust world. And if weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re introducing a powerful technology into unjustworld weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re going to probably exacerbate that injustice unless weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re very, verydeliberate in trying to attack that injustice. I donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t see that happening now. I donÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢tsee that happening and IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m not quite sure how it would happen.If you could draft part of the BioBrick public license, is there a term or aclause or a condition beyond just youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re free to use it, that youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢d like to see hardcoded in there?Yeah. Plenty.What would be your top three?My top three, I would put two lines that shouldnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t be cross and if they arecrossed, they have a further one. The first line is that there should be no release intothe biosphere if anything produced using these parts and that would keep it locked upin the lab. And if it ends up release into the biosphere, there needs to be a legalmechanism to come back on that.That needs to be a crime?Civil law maybe. The ability to try and get some sort of liability. And thesecond would be that these parts shouldnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t be commercialized. This is truly forunderstanding how nature works which I think is a genuinely good reason to dosynthetic biology. ThereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s no need to release into the biosphere as a sort ofuncontrolled experiment. So that would be a second one. And I think thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s aquestion if there is an overwhelming need, maybe. This has come to your questionearlier if thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s an overwhelming need to cross one of those lines to release into theenvironment to commercialize this technology. Then it needs to be a very transparentand participative process for assessing the technology where communities beyond thesynthetic biologists particularly in marginalized communities will be affected, get tohave a over say whether if this moves ahead. I'm not ruling out there might be someuse somewhere in the future which everybody agrees to but I think has to be donedeliberately and with vigilance.Do you think thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s any role for civil society organizations to play in thedevelopment of the technologies so that they can better constrain or guide theirdeployment or lack thereof?Yeah. Civil society organizations tend toÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã‚Â¦itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a wide basket of groups but theynetwork across many different communities and can bring different types ofknowledge to assessing things over these. And I think it is a very powerful role for,not just civil communities and social movements but also the indigenous peoplescommunities and other groups to bring perspectives and knowledge on whichtechnologies we feel more comfortable with and to have some kind of participativeassessment, so in the role of assessment certainly.One last question, a lot of times as technologies have been developed and itbecomes easier to make stuff you can see an increase in diversity could you foresee afuture where humans by their ability to make or change living organisms contribute tobiological diversity in a way thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s constructive or could be celebrated?We brought Drew to the Convention on Biological Diversity and I think part ofyour argument there was weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ll make biological diversity. IsnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t it a great idea? I thinkI find that unlikely that the experiences are mentioned of introducing new species into an environment is usually that they reduced biological diversity and my worry isthatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s whatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s going to happen. IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m not only person to say this. Freeman Dyson haswritten a really interesting essay in which he suggested that if we stop producing largequantities of new engineered organisms by amateurs, weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re probably going to lose alot of the species that we already have. He seems fine with that. IÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢m prettyuncomfortable with it.Okay. Thank you very much. To summarize, Jim notes that there is a lag tothe understanding that humans sort of consequences of developing new technologiesand you mentioned that Pat Mooney said it might be a human generation thirty yearsor so but you actually thought it was longer, seventy years or hundred years. And sofrom that opening, you submitted for our consideration and argued that the policy ofthe long path leading to a precaution in considering and bringing forward newtechnologies as paramount, you use synthetic chemistry as a parallel and highlightedmany different aspects that seemed to be parallel perhaps with synthetic biology.Noting for example the work of Perkin in 1856, developing a dye in England and thenseeing that readily and rapidly commercialized by the French and others in this rapidindustrialization, perhaps at that time, if I understood correctly, coupled to openpatent frameworks but then that was sort of subject to the tides of the time or thedecades and rolled back at various points leading eventually but also somewhatquickly to what you called a concentration of power. This concentration of powerthat leads to misapplication, many horrible things that weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re aware of with chemicalsbeing misapplied back in World War I and World War II and even more recently.The economic impact of the development of chemicals also with synthetic biologyand chemicals produced via biology often times contributes to disfranchisement andimpoverishment of people who are not represented in the process of the developmentor the commercialization of the technology. Further along in the development ofsynthetic chemistry, you noted Rachel CarsonÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s experience and the generation leadingup to that and what we inherit around the impact of synthetic chemicals on theenvironment, on humans. Drawling back the curtain on basically uncontrolledexperiments, I think you might have noted that biology is at least serious as chemistrymight have been if for no other reasons that the things that weÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re constructing canreproduce themselves. Whereas often times chemicals, they get paid once andhopefully they get diluted or destroyed. So in summary around this part of remarks,you came back to again the idea of precaution as a principle in the development ofthis new technology. You noted that the conversation seems quite likely to movebeyond microbes quickly. So if itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s microbes today, itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s plant tomorrow andtechnically I would agree with that. You thought that this was not like geneticengineering. It might be an outgrowth of genetic engineering from the toolsperspective but in terms of the regulatory framework at a whole different beast andthat new approaches are needed. If for example youÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢re compiling an entire organismfrom scratch and thereÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s nothing to compare it to, then what do we compare it to, howdo we know if itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s safe, does that challenge our biosafety framework in some way.You noted that there might likely be a massive increase of organisms release into thebiosphere and if most new things coming in to biosphere if anything successful takesover, itÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s likely to have a traumatic effect on the rest of things and lead to a loss ofdiversity. In particular, you noted a problem, a mistake of vulnerability associatedwith further modification sugar, sugar plus cellulose, and how this provides access toall of natural living world in a way that just simply hasnÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢t been true before, that thiscould lead to further concentration of power. Drawing on some remarks, I rememberfrom Hong Kong increases in landless peasants in Brazil for example and so forth.So to summarize, you concluded by arguing for slamming on the breaks, that we lockthe technology of synthetic biology into the laboratories. We decouple theindustrialization, the commercialization of the technology from the laboratory workand that we go forward with care, great care.One more thing, I did note that the notion that you could develop a viablecommercial industry and not expected to be militarized is a fairy tale and I think thatÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢simportant, that states will press commercial industry into war time use. And I thinkthat should be in mind. Otherwise, yeah, you got it. Thank you.Great. Thank you guys. Well done!